Admiring - and meeting - Remarkable People

I was once asked who I admired – and didn’t find it easy to answer. The dictionary definition (“to regard with wonder, pleasure or approval”) doesn’t seem to me to go far enough. For me, to admire is “to look up to” and has connotations not only of skill but of moral courage. I can admire someone’s eloquence or writings – but not necessarily the person (not, at least in the absence of knowing him/her). I can list some of my “heroes” – people who shone a light at an important stage in my development – and whose work is still worth reading. They would include George Orwell, Reinhardt Niebuhr, EH Carr, RH Tawney, Karl Popper, Ivan Illich……and Tony Crosland who was the only one whom I was fortunate enough to meet and talk with (briefly) when he visited my local Labour Party when I was its chairman in the early 1960s - a few years after he had written the definitive Future of Socialism.

But it was his colleague Hugh Gaitskell whom I really admired for the courage he showed in the late 1950s – as Leader of the Opposition – in standing up to fight for what he believed in. I had talked with him at his house in the late 1950s (invited with other promising young reformers) and was transfixed listening on the radio to his defiant speech at Labour's 1960 party conference where two unilateralist resolutions were carried and the official policy document on defence was rejected. Gaitskell thought these were disastrous decisions and made a passionate speech where he stressed that he would "fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love". This was at a time when I was highly ambivalent about the nuclear issue and would shortly afterwards become an active nuclear disarmer. But I had to admire his courage and oratory.

I was also lucky enough in those days to have a session fixed up for me in the late 1960s with Wilfred Brown, head of the Glacier Metal company and the man who, with the help of Elliott Jaques,  oversaw several experimental efforts in empowerment, workplace democracy, compensation, pricing and organizational design that culminated in the almost two-decade long efforts (1948-1965) led by Dr. Elliot Jaques. This unique collaboration between a CEO and a researcher — which Peter Drucker called "the most extensive study of actual worker behavior in large-scale industry" — resulted in one of the only true comprehensive systems of management and led to groundbreaking discoveries and management methods that challenged almost every area of management and organizational design. For a simplified version of Brown's practice and theory see here. 

Such a combination of leadership with respect for both people and organisational learning is rare indeed

These memories of remarkable people I’ve met were sparked off by an interview with Senator Bennie Saunders in the interesting Orion Magazine. He too I met (in the late 1980s) when he was the “democratic socialist” mayor of Burlington, Vermont, USA. I happened to be in Vermont, knew of him and asked to meet him (as a fellow democratic socialist politician). He has shown immense guts not only in the various fights he has taken on with corporate interests in his attempt to represent the ordinary citizen – but for the simple act of not disguising his basic values.   

Perhaps the most remarkable person I ever met was a Romanian - Cornel Coposu – then (1991) Leader of the newly re-established Christian Democratic Peasant  Party who was condemned in 1947 to spend 15 years in prison for his activities in the National Peasant Party. After his release, Coposu started work as an unskilled worker on various construction sites (given his status as a former prisoner, he was denied employment in any other field), and was subject to surveillance and regular interrogation.[]

His wife was also prosecuted in 1950 during a rigged trial and died in 1965 soon after her release, from an illness contracted in prison. Coposu managed to keep contact with PNŢ sympathisers, and re-established the party as a clandestine group during the 1980s, while imposing its affiliation to the Christian Democrat International.

I also had brief but one-to-one meetings with two great German Presidents -  Richard von Weizsacker and Johannes Rau. Weizsacker was a Christian Democract and President 1984-1994 and West Berlin Mayor 1981-84. Rau was a Social Democrat; President 1999-2004 and Head of the huge RheinWestphalen Land (Region) from 1978-98. I was lucky enough to meet both of these men informally and can therefore vouch personally for the humility they brought to their role. Weizsacker was holidying in Scotland and popped in quietly to pay his respects to the leader of the Regional Council. As the (elected) Secretary to the majority party, I had private access to the Leader’s office and stumbled in on their meeting. Rau I also stumbled across when in a Duisberg hotel on Council business. He was not then the President – but I recognised him when he came in with his wife and a couple of assistants, introduced myself ( as a fellow social democrat); gave him a gift book on my Region which I happened to be carrying and was rewarded with a chat.

And then there was Tisa von der Schulenburg - Prussian aristocrat, nun and artist in 1920s Berlin who supported her brother in the plot to assassinate Hitler whom I met a few years before her death (at 97!) – at an exhibition of the sketches she had done in the 1939s of the Durham miners.

"Tisa" Schulenburg's life was by any standard remarkable. Having grown up among the Prussian nobility and witnessed the trauma of Germany's defeat in the Great War, she frequented the salons of Weimar Berlin, shocked her family by marrying a Jewish divorce in the 1930s, fled Nazi Germany for England, worked as an artist with the Durham coal miners, and spent her later years in a convent in the Ruhr.

Her experience of the darker moments of the 20th century was reflected in her sculpture and drawing, in which the subject of human suffering and hardship was a constant theme - whether in the form of Nazi terror or the back-breaking grind of manual labour at the coal face. 

When she heard that I was a politician from Strathclyde Region - with its mining traditions in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire - she presented me with a signed portfolio of her 1930s drawings of the NE English miners for onward donation to the Scottish miners.

And I almost forgot my memorable lunch with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri!
So what do all these stories tell? All but one of the people I;ve mentioned are dead! And those I met, I met only for a few minutes - 60 at most. Does this mean we can admire only from afar? Hopefully not.

In a future post I want to say something about "closer admiration"

The painting at the top of this post is one of Tony Todorov - of whom I spoke yesterday

Some contemporary Bulgarian artists

My Bulgarian artist friends are remarkably patient about my passion for the work of their dead compatriots. And I should feel guilty that my purchases, for the most part, do not help existing painters survive or nurture new talent. I say “for the most part” since my collection does include about 30 contemporary works – mainly realist. Three artists in particular caught my eye early on – 

Juliana Sotirova, an incredibly talented, productive and versatile young woman from whom I have bought some 12 paintings. These include a specially-commissioned one of my father which she did from a black and white photograph I gave her. I was stunned with the uncanny likeness when she revealed it to me.

She has a variety of favourite themes - old houses; African scenes; still-lives. I will try in future posts to lead with some of her paintings I love looking at.  

Milcho Kostadinov’s more impressionistic take on run-down Sofia and Plovdiv buildings charmed me from the beginning – with their soft greys and small bursts of colour.

Recently he has moved to boats, nudes and the sea.

Angela Minkova is the last of the trio whose work has always attracted me – with its creativity and humour.

She concentrates on aquarelles (a lot on the theme of Queen Mary at Balcik) and on fantastic small sculptures made from a variety of materials eg bone and feather.

Two people in Sofia are responsible for what (little) I know about the contemporary scene - Yassen Golev of Konus Gallery (reference in previous post) and Vihra Pesheva of Astry Gallery. They are lovely people – full of passion and integrity. Yassen is also an artist – a couple of whose works I have already shown on this blog.

Vihra organises special exhibitions in her tiny gallery – and it is there I was first introduced to the work of the trio I have spoken about above.

And also where I purchased my first “non-realist” works from two Veliko Tarnovo artists Natasha Atanassova 

and her partner Nikolai Tiholov. 

Both produce such joyful works!

It was also in the Astry Gallery that I met Tony Todorov who does amazing pieces which are growing on me. I particularly like the painting 3 minutes 16 seconds into the video.

And it was in Astry too that I was privileged to meet an old giant of Bulgarian painting Vassil Vulev – in his 80s - and it was three of his 1980s aquarelles I bought.

Finally I have to confess that this is one of the first Bulgarian paintings I bought (way back in 2008) - at the open-air market at Alexander Nevsky Church. By Violetta Stanoeva. Interesting that it was symbolic! And with all the appropriate symbols. But more than a touch of kitsch

How one’s tastes change!

Nature's Bounty - Preparing for winter

I like this time of year – although, in this part of the world, it does presage grim months ahead - last winter, my old neighbours had difficulty opening their door at one point because of the packed snow lying against it – and temperatures fell to minus 30 in the area for a week or so.  Spring, obviously, is a more optimistic time of year – despite TS Eliot’s line about “April is the cruellest month”. But my vivid memories are of late Septembers, as a child, of the long table between my father’s pulpit and the congregation groaning with vegetables and fruits as the Presbyterian Church in Scotland celebrated HarvestThanksgiving.

The weather is still balmy here in the mountains but, from my balcony overlooking the village road, I can see the village prepare for winter – tractors towing carriers full of cut wood for the stoves; livestock changing their pasture; work on the houses stepping up a pace to ensure it’s finished before the snow strikes - and stays (for several months). And patterns in my own work reflect this – arranging at last for the cracked boiler of the (wood-fired) central heating to be repaired and the system tested for the winter; today shifting the summer shirts to another section of the wardrobe, bringing out the winter shirts, washing some and exposing all of them to the warm, strong wind which sweeps along the balcony.  

The link I’ve given to TS Eliot above is a great reading by three very good British actors (interposed with Eliot himself - very dry) of The Waste Land – not a favourite of mine. I am, however, very fond of his FourQuartets - giving an excerpt of my favourite section this time last year. Here is a useful commentary

I'm very happy to show, at the top of the post, my Yassen Golev aquarelle. He is a friend, the owner of Konus gallery in Sofia and helped me a lot with my booklet on Bulgarian realist painters. He does great surrealist oils - and these highly detailed still-life aquarelles.

Plutocracy at work

 As someone who has fought 20 successful elections over a 22 year-period - 8 of them public elections; and 12 internal "political group" elections for leadership positions, I am now remarkably indifferent to (if not cynical about) elections. Particularly American elections whose "policy-makers" are so much in thrall to commercial interests - not least because their (very expensive) campaigns are funded by these same interests.

Radicals like myself, of course, often run the danger of underestimating the importance of voting for "least worst" candidates to avoid the worst excesses of the rampant neo-liberal characters who are everywhere these days in elections. A "what if" approach to history has become quite popular these days - what if Gore or McCain had been elected??

A good solid analysis here on the financial and tactical aspects of the current Presidential elections in the USA shows the extent to which big money thinks it can buy elections. Two and half billion dollars spent so far by the various campaigns to put one man in the White House. The article also suggests that the Obama campaign tactics have been well-researched and successful -     

Romney's outside fundraising body or "Super Pac", called Restore Our Future, has no fewer than 25 billionaires on its list of donors. Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate, has alone injected almost $40m into this election cycle in favour of Republican candidates and may approach $100m before it's done. Emboldened by the two court rulings in 2010 (Citizens United v Federal Election Commission andSpeechnow.org v Federal Election Commission) that removed any barriers from the investment of corporate, union or private money into elections, Adelson and other mega-wealthy donors will have pumped in close to $500m come November. That in turn will bring the total cost of putting one man into the White House to a dizzying total of $2.5bn.
"Wealthy donors are injecting money into the electoral process at a level we have never seen before," said Bob Biersack, who tracks the influence of cash in politics at the Centre for Responsive Politics. "The danger is that this will swing the balance of power, effectively disenfranchising the majority of Americans."

Obama has fought off the march of Big Money partly by transmitting a positive message to voters of who he is and where he stands. His convention was a master-class in political communications, replete with a lecture from the master himself, Bill Clinton. With his help, Obama made the case that the continuing hardship felt by many Americans was not a reflection of his own failed policies, as the Republicans contest, but rather a sign that he needs more time to get the job finished. "It will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades," he said.

The 2012 election was always going to be about the economy, and it remains Obama's most vulnerable point. But in this crucial area the Obama re-election campaign has coolly refused to be cowed by the Republican assault and calmly turned the argument back against them: the economic meltdown happened on the Republicans' watch; Romney opposed the bailout of the car manufacturers; though the economy still falters, the stock exchange is robust; and house prices are beginning to recover. Those arguments have played well in battlegrounds like Ohio, where Obama's role in having saved the auto industry resonates among its thousands of car parts and distribution outlets. The state has a jobless rate of 7.2%, notably below the national average.
Across the country, the anxious electorate appear to have been listening. This week's Quinnipiac poll records that for the first time since it began following the Obama-Romney race, the president has come out on top on the economy. Some 51% of likely voters said that Obama would do a better job on the economy to Romney's 46%.

While Romney and his conservative rivals were slugging it out with each other for the Republican nomination, the Obama team were quietly working behind the scenes to define Romney's biography. In a series of attack ads aired remorselessly in the swing states, they painted him as a rich kid born with a silver spoon in his mouth who had no affinity with the daily trials of the middle classes, destroyed ordinary people's lives as head of Bain Capital, and was so arrogant that he wouldn't declare his taxes.

Quinnipiac's Peter Brown, who as a polling analyst sides with neither of the two main parties, says he has never witnessed such a successful character assassination in a presidential race. "They have turned Romney into a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist, who is just not someone the average voter wants to have a beer with."

The cartoon is a James Gillray
Here's a good piece on a new book on pluocracy

The greatest art form?

Yesterday’s post on the Azeri satirical journal of the 1920s reflected my admiration of graphic arts as a whole - let alone those who do caricature – which has been defined as “moral satire – making some point about the nature of man rather than a specific individual”. I would amend that slightly to replace “rather than” with “as much as” since some of the most famous caricatures have savaged individuals. The classic caricaturists for me are Goya and Daumier – with the Germans (Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz and Max Beckmann) making a powerful contribution in the early part of the 20^th century before the later British caricaturists such as Gerald Scarfe.

A retired British politician who has such a great passion for political caricatures that he was instrumental in opening a London museum devoted to the art suggests on this interesting video on the history of British caricature that “graphic satire is an art form (the only one) which Britain created” – starting with William Hogarth. In his steps followed James Gillray (the work above is his - an ambassador presenting his "credentials" to the King - more here), George Cruikshank and Max Beerbohm 

And, during my researches for this post, I was delighted to find this glorious output from some Glasgow artists in the 1820s giving incredible insights into the lives of Glasgow people in those times.

I had been aware that it was not easy to find books (in English) about this art form (however defined) or even its best practitioner such as Daumier. A very useful 1980s article on the genre (the only one I could find on the internet) tells me that it has been viewed down the ages as inferior. For the life of me I can’t understand why – since its exaggerations and social scenes are far more inclusive and tell us so much more than what passed for portrait painting.

A recent exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum reminded us of the greats. For those who want to know more, here is a two hour video with three presenters. And there is a great website on Daumier which not only gives all his works but actually explains the background of each!

The Bulgarian tradition of caricaturists is a very strong one – starting (I think) with Alexander Bozhinov a hundred years ago and including people such as Ilyia Beshkov, Marco Behar, Boris Angeloushev and Jules Pascin  whose main efforts were in the pre-war period.
One of my prize possessions is a copy of a 1954 magazine called New Bulgaria with each of its 18 pages covered with 3-4 amazing pencil caricatures almost certainly doodled by Bulgaria’ most loved graphic artist – Ilyia Beshkov.
I was happy to pay 250 euros for the journal – after all I got 50 sketches for about the same price as the going rate for one (admittedly larger) caricature of his! 

And delightful, comprehensive volumes have been published (in Bulgarian of course) on the first three of these individuals – Beshkov and Behar in the pre 1989 period; Angeloushev more recently.
Bulgaria at least honours its graphic artists properly.
Here's one blogger's introduction to eight old Bulgarian illustrators - a more general word, perhaps, than "caricature", "satire", "comic"........

How artists coped during communist repression is a fascinating subject - some (like Boris Denev and Nikolai Boiadjiev) refused to toe the official line on painting and almost stopped painting; many other moved into theatre design and cinema; others had to emigrate. One of them, Rayko Aleksiev, so annoyed the communists that he was arrested on their coming to power and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. An important Gallery is named after him – on Rakorski St. Things eased only in the 1980s largely due to the influence of PM Zhivkov's daughter who was a great art afficiando!

View of another world

Although I blog frequently about Bulgaria and Romania (between which countries I have been dividing my life in these last 5 years), I should say more about the other countries in which I have spent significant time – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgzstan, for example. A New York Review of Books blogpost and a review in The Nation of a forgotten Azeri satirical magazine of a century ago gives me an opportunity to rectify this oversight. To give an easy introduction to the various actors, I borrow from the review in the Nation - adding in, where appropriate, links one of which is to a recent book on the magazine containing many of the caricatures with powerful line drawing and colours.

The backstreets of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, have a certain, winding magic. They house former caravanserai, once flophouses offered to travellers throughout central Asia, that have today been polished up into candlelit restaurants. Tall, grey blocks mingle with flourishes of Persian architecture - a symbol of Baku's straddling geography between Russia and Iran. But there are dozens of bookshops tucked away in these streets, shelves stacked with first editions and Soviet periodicals from the city's communist era, which ended in 1991.
It was in one of these booksellers near Maiden Tower that Slavs and Tatars, a collective of artists and writers, discovered a true bibliophile's dream: editions of one of the region's most daring yet overlooked satirical publications - Molla Nasreddin. Stating their sphere of interest as everything east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, Slavs and Tatars make this loosely defined area of Eurasia their patch. Starting as a reading group that shared translations of books from this region (what they call "an arcane version of the Oprah Winfrey book club"), they've since exhibited sculptures and installation work in museums internationally, and been part of group shows at The Third Line gallery in Dubai.

"The illustrations drew us to Molla Nasreddin," says Slavs and Tatars. "They're reminiscent of Honore Daumier or Toulouse Lautrec." Molla Nasreddin was founded in 1906 by editor-in-chief Jalil Mammadguluzadeh and satirist-poet Mirza Sabir, both proud Azeris yet champions of a "modern" and markedly western system of values. It espoused this worldview via beautifully wrought yet withering cartoons and editorials that remain biting today.
Few were spared the editorial wrath: suffocating and outmoded fanatics, meddling European and Russian imperial powers, the position of women in society at that time and the hypocritical elite. Education, equality and regional independence, through a lens of secularism, was Mammadguluzadeh and Sabir's vision for central Asia's future. It was penned in Azeri Turkish in three different scripts - Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets - showing the three forms that the language went through as Azerbaijan passed into Soviet hands. This made translation into English difficult when Slavs and Tatars set out to publish a reader in 2011, titled "Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That Would've, Could've, Should've". Here's another good review which gives a sense of the treasures the book holds

The book features their selections from 3,000 illustrations, curated into the different avenues of critique that the magazine took - such as Education, Colonialism and Women.
One illustration, for instance, shows two Azeri women wrapped from head to toe in fabric, and pointing in envy at the barred windows of a prison. The caption alongside reads: "Sister, look how lucky they are: they have windows!"
In another, five beaten-down Azeri men carry bespectacled donkeys on their back; plumes of smoke rise from long cigarette holders in the mouths of these remarkably aristocratic looking beasts.

Despite moving offices to and from Georgia and Iran, intermittent bans, and 10 years of the Soviets increasingly shoving editorial directives down the throats of the magazine's staff, Molla Nasreddin survived until 1931. Simultaneously, a cloud of obscurity seemed to settle over a region that, says Slavs and Tatars, had been one of the most intellectually and politically important places in the past 2,000 years.

"If anybody even takes notice of this region, they think of it as obscure, especially the more west you go - you talk to people about Kyrgyzstan, and you might as well be talking about Star Wars," says Slavs and Tatars. "But Baku was producing half of the world's oil until the first half of the 20th century," noting as well that Azerbaijan was one of the first countries in which women could vote (well before the UK), and publications such as Molla Nasreddin demonstrate an intellectual, progressive rigour from this part of the world that has been so far overlooked.
"That's why we're called Slavs and Tatars and not by our real names: it's not the work of a group of artists but the work of a region that has many nationalities, and had a shared heritage at some point. "From the point of view of the West, with this nonsense that passes as conventional wisdom that the West and Islam are on a collision course; you have to look at a part of the world where they have long coexisted." Namely, Eurasia.
The collective say, however, that Molla Nasreddin is also their antithesis in that it took modernity to mean westernisation. "We don't believe that at all, in fact we believe in quite the opposite - more of an indigenous or hybridised form of modernity."  But they still acknowledge its historical significance: "It's a shame that it came down to us as artists and writers in the early 21st century to rediscover one of the most important publications of the Muslim world," they continue. "That's testament to how overlooked this part of the world is.
"Very few people would spend two years of their life working on something they disagree with, but we are living in an increasingly insular world intellectually - less and less are we embracing the things that we disagree with."

I’ve been wanting for some time to do a post (if not a booklet!) about beautiful publications - which bring together layout; font; illustrations; paper quality; binding; and writing. It's a challenging combination which some cookery books almost manage (with the exception of font and writing) 

Optimism, realism and scepticism

First, a welcome to my new readers from the Ukraine – northern neighbours who, my statistics show, have been my most faithful readers over the past week.

I wanted to return to the issue of what has been learned from all the reforms which Britain has attempted in the running of its public services and machinery of government in the past 40 years (raised in a recent blogpost) but have been distracted by the glorious weather which followed the few days of cold and mist. 

First snow of the autumn was on the Bucegi mountains opposite on 22 September (see shot above) but the afternoon sun on the terrace has soon had me stripping off. Today is the third in a row of such superb weather and makes me even less inclined to pop down to Bucharest for its current festival of radio orchestra music. Bucharest inspires very different feelings in me from Sofia – and indeed from some other ex-pats who love the place.

For me Bucharest is only a stopover for better places – but don’t let me discourage those who want to taste its “blowsy charms”. The Sarah in Romania blog is one of the most sympathetic to (if also angry about) the city and marked Bucharest’s birthday with an appropriate post -

This is not a post to list the hundreds of dreadful, illegal demolitions. It is not a post to slag off Mayor Oprescu and the architecture commission, nor the Chief Architect of Bucharest. I have written many of those and it's neither the time nor the place. I say only that after 553 years, while everyone else is trying to improve their cities, renovate rather than rebuild wherever possible, underline the beauty of their architecture and highlight their history whether it be joyous or tragic and syphon traffic away from the centre in order to make things so much more pleasant for citizens, Bucharest is attacked and disfigured by greedy, corrupt, lousy parasites right from the top down to the very bottom.

Those who move a finger are few and far between. I know they exist, that tiny 10%. There are associations, NGOs and individuals who care VERY much. But it seems like a flea up against a tsunami...This was a city where beauty stood on every turn, where every corner was a photo opportunity and where history, patrimony and heritage mattered.  A city (and a country for that matter) which valued education and promoted learning, where the university was renowned and the doctors admired. A city (and country) whose musicians exuded incredible poetry through symphonies and suites and whose concert halls were filled with names that would wow any 'mélomane'. Yes, times were hard, of course they were. But, on the whole there was respect and far more pride than we find today. There was elegance. 

Of course, one can still find beauty in Bucharest - that quiet, shy, almost reticent loveliness that brings a lump to one's throat every time one is confronted with it. You only have to read further back on this blog (and so many others besides) for examples. Perhaps, for the visitors as well as for many Bucharest residents, one must be told where to look - the splendid streets around Dorobanti, the hidden villas behind Unirii, the oldy-worldiness of Tineretului, the charm of what's left around Cismigiu on all sides, the elegance of Cotroceni and Icoanei - and that's just for starters. Bucharest demands to be loved. Few of us actually do. Indeed, there IS beauty.

I have also been rereading some books – eg Smile or Die: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Promoting the idea that happiness is within your grasp is in the interests of corporations trying to bamboozle an overworked and underpaid workforce. It's also favoured by churches trying to get rich quick off the American dream. Ehrenreich traces the fad from Calvinist self-control through Christian Science to blatant assumptions of the holiness of cash. Informing the uneducated and unmedicated that their plight is all their own fault is followed up by instructions for making anything you desire – from a new TV screen to a trip to Mexico – "materialise" through mind control. The censorship of negative opinion combines perfectly with the American policy of each man for himself in the best of all possible worlds.This is the philosophy that gave us the smart bomb, the space programme, sub-prime mortgages, plenty of psychopaths and Sarah Palin. Ehrenreich writes that America is unsurpassed in one area: "the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news". .

Even right-wing newspapers reviewed the book positively.   

Ehrenreich savages the instigator of Positive Psychology and finishes on an important note about the importance of realism if not scepticism – an important theme in this blog. I hadn’t until now realised the possible significance of my latest little publication – on Bulgarian realist painting! 

The USA, as a reassessment of a 1960s classic reminds us, has a long tradition of what the book's title calls anti-intellectualism - 

there arose an ethos, a romantic conviction, that a popular democracy should favor "the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do." Practical experience mattered more than imaginative thinking, and vital emotion trumped anemic rationality. "Just as the evangelicals repudiated a learned religion and formally constituted clergy in favor of the wisdom of the heart and direct access to God, so did advocates of egalitarian politics propose to dispense with trained leadership in favor of the native practical sense of the ordinary man with its direct access to truth. This preference for the wisdom of the common man flowered in the most extreme statements of the democratic creed, into a kind of militant popular anti-intellectualism."

Deep writing

I often bemoan the quality of writing available in journals – dumbed down by marketing pressures or unreadable from the perversions of academic specialisation. A fine exception, I’ve just noticed, is the New Yorker which uses academics who can actually write coherently and gracefully. The current issue has a long and fascinating piece by Prof Jill Lepore on the origins in the 1930s of US political consulting which has removed policy content from politics in that country. The story starts with a marvellous story of the famous writer Upton Sinclair standing for the Californian Governorship under the slogan “End poverty in California" (EPIC) at a time when the Republicans held a total monopoly of power – and how he was defeated by the lies spun by the world’s first political spinners who simply planted in a major newspaper each day a phrase from one of his novels as if it was his policy. The couple behind this went on to run the campaigns against a state health system which President Truman tried to introduce.
For the latest techniques on political campaigning, see here. 

I realise now how ill-informed my comment about the The New Yorker was when I picked up a copy of Julian Barnes' Letters from London 1990-1995 and read the  Preface which explains the rigour of editing carried out by the TNY which he experienced personally when for those 5 years he was its London correspondent!

You can also access in the New Yorker a full analysis done by Louis Menand earlier in the year of the sort of work Mitt Romney actually did for Bain Capital and what this (and his campaign book) implies about his view of the world and leadership style. 

Romney’s program is logical (which doesn’t mean that it’s practical). He believes that if freedom is to be fostered and preserved around the world the United States needs a stronger military. For the United States to have a stronger military, it has to grow economically. For the nation to grow economically, American companies must become more productive. And, for American companies to become more productive, business has to be allowed to do business.

This means that Americans have to tolerate, to appreciate, even to encourage what Romney calls (using a phrase borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter) “creative destruction.”It’s a strange slogan for a politician to adopt at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty, but Romney invokes it in his book and he uses it in interviews, because it’s precisely what he means by business. To make the future, we have to be willing to destroy some of the present. “It takes a leap of faith for governments to stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in a free economy,” as Romney puts it. We can’t be sentimental. And everything can be thought of in this way, from the production of microchips to the education of children. If we want cheaper chips or better schools, we have to be willing to pay the transaction costs. The unwillingness to do so is what’s holding us back. (A famous saying about omelettes might come to mind here.)

Who or what stands in the way of restoring American productivity and American greatness? Romney lists some of the usual suspects, including multiculturalism (a “fraud”) and “the self-loathing of Western intellectuals” (an odd expression, since all the Western intellectuals I know think rather well of themselves). But readers of “No Apology” are likely to come away with the impression that the chief internal enemy the United States faces today is labor unions. Romney thinks that unions can sometimes work constructively with management but that, fundamentally, they are protectors of the status quo. They make it harder for the destroying part to work.This is why Romney opposed George Bush’s efforts to protect the American steel industry by imposing a tariff on imports, and it’s why he opposed the Detroit bailout (embarrassingly for him. highly successful). Actions like those interfere with the natural business process in the name of saving American jobs. And it’s why Romney’s well-known infelicities—“I like being able to fire people,” “For an economy to thrive . . . a lot of people . . . will suffer,” “Corporations are people,” “I’m not concerned about the very poor”—are not really gaffes, even in the unfair, out-of-context form in which his opponents circulate them. They express something true to the way that Romney sees the world.

Romney’s record at Bain Capital holds obvious interest for his political opponents. Private-equity firms and leveraged buyouts, which is one of the ways Bain pursued its business, are, after all, pretty much capitalism parading around in its most naked state. Romney developed his view of the world during his earlier, nine-year experience, with B.C.G. and Bain & Company, as a management consultant. There are several strains running through the history of management theory, and which paradigms are dominant, and at which consulting firms, depends on the economic times and the nature of the competition. At B.C.G. and Bain & Company between 1975 and 1984, data crunching seems to have been the main engine of analysis. Virtually everyone agrees that Romney was extremely good at this, and he operates his political campaigns in the same way.“He’s not a very notional leader,” Romney’s campaign spokesman told an Iowa newspaper in 2007. “He is more interested in data, and what the data mean.”

But it’s not just that Romney doesn’t have good political instincts. It’s that he was trained to distrust instinct altogether. In management consulting, gut feelings are what you work hard to take out of the equation. That’s the justification for all that painstaking analysis: the consultant who crunches a mountain of numbers to come up with an idea that the C.E.O. already has will not get far. It’s the counter-intuitiveness of the advice that justifies the fee.

It must be difficult being Mitt Romney – with a great progressive father to look up to; a sickening record of bean-counting and employment destruction (at arms’ length it must be said); a reasonably progressive record in his 5 years as Governor (although he hardly spoke to Congressmen) most of which he has had to disavow in the fight for the right-wing votes of the Republican nomination. I don’t doubt that he is a caring neighbour but he must be one sick man in his soul.

Let’s return, however, to the issue of good writing – by which I mean the ability to take a complex issue and make it enjoyable to read about (which I last discussed in mid-June). Until recently, the New York Review of Books has been my favourite journal – although the London Review of Books has been coming up fast on the inside lane. Take, for example, this magnificent bit of writing about (of all things) the British experience of electricity privatisation by the Scottish writer James Meek. Or, in the current issue, a great piece of sceptical reportage on the recent Republican Convention.

America has some great journals – I discovered Harpers when I was there in the late 1980s and also Wilson’s Quarterly. I like the latter's mission statement - 

THE WILSON QUARTERLY is a window on the world of ideas for general readers. Historical perspective and a commitment to consider all sides are the hallmarks of its articles on foreign affairs, politics, culture, science, and other subjects.By making new knowledge accessible to all, it aims to foster more informed public debate.

I don't like the fact that the current issue is the last print issue - from now on it will be available only online. I find this tragic - for all the reasons covered in the numerous articles which attack the notion of the end of books.

America has had some highly original and passionate writers and essayist – not a few of British origin! Sadly two of them died recently – everyone had heard of Chris Hitchens but not so many of Alexander Cockburn of whom Robin Blackburn writes eloquently in the current issue of New Left Review.

And, appropriately, from the superb website, It's about Time - great paintings of women reading
But pride of place - at the top of this post - is a Turner which has "turned up" (forgive the pun) after more than 100 years. I like to think this sort of painting inspired Bulgaria's Alexander Moutafov in the early part of the 20th century